IIE Platform for Education in Emergencies Response (PEER)

In response to the world's global education emergencies, the Catalyst Foundation for Universal Education and the Institute of International Education (IIE) developed the Platform for Education in Emergencies Response (PEER), an online clearinghouse enabling displaced and refugee students to connect with educational opportunities so they may continue formal and informal higher education. Due to the devastating impact of the Syria crisis on the country’s students, PEER will initially focus on the educational needs of Syrian students at the university level. Prior to the war, almost 30% of Syria’s youth was enrolled in higher education. Today, over 200,000 university-aged Syrian students have had their higher education disrupted.

The Syria conflict is unprecedented in its impact on university-aged students and has highlighted the need for increased collaboration and coordination between public and private sector stakeholders to respond to higher education in emergencies. Governments, NGOs, foundations and volunteers are undertaking great efforts to assist Syrian students but are often unaware of parallel or similar initiatives in the field. Students find out about scholarships and other opportunities through coincidence or word of mouth and often lack the resources and knowledge to navigate the application processes. To bridge this gap, PEER aims at creating a holistic platform that offers a database with educational opportunities and additional resources for students. PEER strives to engage with partners to share knowledge and best practices in higher education in emergencies, build capacity within the PEER network and create new opportunities for collaboration among PEER partners.

While PEER initially focuses on Syrian students, the platform will at full scale become a global resource for all refugee and displaced students connecting them to scholarships, language and online learning, and other educational resources. Additional services such as virtual advising will be added to the PEER platform. PEER will also feature a multilingual site providing information for students and partners in Arabic and English.

The PEER platform currently hosts hundreds of scholarships and other learning opportunities for Syrian refugee and displaced students. To learn more, visit the PEER website here.

The Education Quality and Learning for All (EQUAL) Global Research Network

The EQUAL Global Research Network is a group of education researchers based out of the Global TIES for Children Center at New York University. This research network will study and develop learning outcome measures for children at every grade level in order to improve regional education systems and reduce inequality in learning. The goal of the project is to realize the promise of UN Sustainable Development Goal 4, which calls for every child to have access to a quality education by 2030.

The Catalyst Foundation’s support for the EQUAL project is designed to build the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) portion of the network by providing seed grant funding for individual education researchers from universities and NGOs in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, the UAE, and elsewhere in the MENA region, for projects that will measure learning, development, and quality in education programs on a national scale. Many countries in this region are struggling to provide equitable access to quality education. This is due in part to the significant numbers of people who have been displaced by ongoing violent conflict in the region: over half of the refugee populations in countries such as Lebanon and Jordan are children and youth under age 17. The overwhelming majority of these children lack access to a quality education that would promote effective learning and healthy development. The projects funded by these seed grants will take into account the particular challenges of educating children who have fled conflict zones and experienced trauma, and will include the examination and development of context-specific learning measurements that are broader than traditional measures of reading and math.

The project assumes that networks are more powerful than single researchers: the more nodes there are in the network, the more the ideas and research in this critical area can be shared, and the more that children in these countries and regions will benefit. Building on the premise that sharing information within regional and global networks will bring about more innovation and greater impact, Catalyst’s support will also allow the Global TIES Center at NYU to convene participating researchers periodically at regional and global conferences to share the results of their research and propose policy solutions.

To learn more about the Global TIES for Children Center, please visit their website here.

The Bridges Educational Inclusion Project

The Bridges Project will provide access to the highest quality education in Slovakia for Roma children and children with physical disabilities, two of the most vulnerable, least integrated, and least educated populations in a country where political extremism is on the rise. The project supports the efforts of the C.S. Lewis Bilingual High School, an academically rigorous and progressive high school in Bratislava, to recruit and retain talented youth from disadvantaged groups that have long been relegated to low-quality, segregated education, offering them hope for a better future. In addition to establishing a scholarship fund for these students, the Bridges project will develop an integrated curriculum and programming to address issues of bias against the Roma and individuals with disabilities.

The Bridges Project seeks simultaneously to support a critical mass of young, educated Roma students and students with disabilities, and foster a school culture for all of its students that emphasizes inclusion, tolerance, and cross-cultural understanding. In the way, the school hopes to create future leaders with integrity who are committed to principles of inclusion. The project will have three interrelated components: (1) a program for scholarships, outreach, and support of disadvantaged students; (2) a program for curricular and cultural development at C.S. Lewis High School; and (3) a program to ensure the sustainability and impact of the project.

To learn more about C.S. Lewis Bilingual High School, please visit their website here.